Center for the Study of Women

Conversations in Black Feminist Practice: Black Queer Radicalisms
2021-05-07 13:00 - 14:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Online/Zoom
A Discussion Between Charlene Carruthers and C. Riley Snorton
Moderated by Ebony Oldham with a Welcome by SA Smythe
This event has passed. View a recording on our YouTube Channel.
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This talk is part of the Black Feminism Initiative’s 2020-2021 public program series, Conversations in Black Feminist Practice.
DATE: Friday, May 7, 2021
TIME: 1:00 PM-2:30 PM
LOCATION: Online

Charlene Carruthers is a political strategist, cultural worker, and PhD student in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. A practitioner of telling more complete stories, her research includes Black feminist political economies, abolition of patriarchal and carceral systems, and the role of cultural work within the Black Radical Tradition.
Her work spans more than 15 years of community organizing across racial, gender and economic justice movements. As the founding national director of BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100), she has worked alongside hundreds of young Black activists to build a national base of activists in a member-led organization of Black 18-35 year olds dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all Black people. She is the author of the book Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (available in English and Spanish language).

C. Riley Snorton, Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, is jointly appointed in the department and the Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies. Snorton is a cultural theorist who focuses on racial, sexual and transgender histories and cultural productions. He is the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association, the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association, the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction, the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and an honorable mention from the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award Committee. Snorton is also the co-editor of Saturation: Race, Art and the Circulation of Value (MIT Press/New Museum, 2020).

Thinking Gender 2021: "Care, Mutual Aid, and Reproductive Labor in a Time of Crisis"
2021-04-28 08:00 - 2021-04-30 17:00
This event has passed. Watch the Keynote Panel on our YouTube Channel.

Thinking Gender 2021
31st Annual Graduate Student Research Conference
“Care, Mutual Aid, and Reproductive Labor in a Time of Crisis”
April 28-30, 2021

Free, Public Keynote Panel on Friday, April 30, 2021
(Register for Zoom link)
Thinking Gender 2021 will focus on feminist, queer, trans, transnational, Indigenous, and intersectional approaches to care, mutual aid, and reproductive labor.
Abstract submissions are now closed.
For Thinking Gender 2021, graduate student presentations will be held in private workshops on April 28-29. Only the April 30 keynote panel will be open to the public.
Poster illustration by Favianna Rodriguez. Copyright 2020 Favianna.com.

KEYNOTE PANEL

Join the UCLA Center for the Study of Women on Friday, April 30, 2021 for a special Thinking Gender 2021 webinar featuring keynote presentations and a conversation with Dean Spade and Melanie Yazzie on the subject of mutual aid, abolitionist politics of care, and radical relationality.
Register online to receive the Zoom link! This webinar will be livestreamed, and a recording will be posted on our YouTube channel. Closed captioning is available.
DATE: Friday, April 30, 2021
TIME: 12:00 PM-1:30 PM
LOCATION: Zoom Webinar (RSVP required)
Keynote Panelists:

DEAN SPADE
“Mutual Aid for Survival and Mobilization”
Dean Spade’s talk draws from his recently published book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next) (Verso Press 2020), which provides a grassroots theory and practical tools of mutual aid as a key to practicing abolition.
Dean Spade has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He’s the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!,” and the creator of the mutual aid toolkit at BigDoorBrigade.com. His latest book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), was published by Verso Press in October 2020.

MELANIE K. YAZZIE
“Ecologies of Indigenous Caretaking”
Melanie Yazzie’s presentation explores Indigenous mutual-aid approaches to “radical relationality” and care between Indigenous people, land, and water.
Melanie K. Yazzie (Diné) is Assistant Professor of Native American Studies and American Studies at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in Navajo/American Indian history, political ecology, Indigenous feminisms, queer Indigenous studies, and theories of policing and the state. She also organizes with The Red Nation, a grassroots Native-run organization committed to the liberation of Indigenous people from colonialism and capitalism.

Moderators:

CATHERINE FELIZ
Catherine Feliz is an interdisciplinary artist and medicine person born and raised in Lenapehoking territory [New York City] to parents from Kiskeya Ayiti [Dominican Republic]. An entanglement with archival research, disarming apparatuses of violence, and earth based healing inform their practice. They work to reclaim ancestral technologies that have been systematically erased by drawing from multiple disciplines to unearth histories and make space for decolonial futures. Catherine is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles department of Interdisciplinary Studio. You might also know Catherine as the medicine-maker behind Botánica Cimarrón, the co-founder of Abuela Taught Me — an Afro-Taino Two-Spirit educational space, and a founding member of Homecoming — a QTBIPOC radical care collective.

ROSIE STOCKTON
Rosie Stockton is a PhD student in the Gender Studies Department, and is the 2021 Thinking Gender Graduate Student Coordinator. Their research draws on abolitionist feminisms, Black feminist thought, and queer and trans critique to look at political and aesthetic practices of anti-carceral resistance. They are a member of the UCLA Black Feminism Initiative, and an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) and the DROP LWOP campaign. They are also a poet, and their first book, Permanent Volta, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in May 2021.

Cosponsored by

American Indian Studies Center
American Indian Studies Program
Anthropology Department
Asian American Studies Center
Asian American Studies Department
Chicana/o and Central American Studies Department
Chicano Studies Research Center
Critical Race Studies Program at UCLA School of Law
Division of Humanities
Gender Studies Department
Institute for American Cultures
Institute for Research on Labor and Employment
Labor Center
Office of the Chancellor
Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law
Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies
Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law

Rupture and Continuity
2021-04-23 10:00 - 2021-04-25 16:00
Organized by the Department of Political Science
1st Annual UCLA Graduate Conference in Political Theory
Date: Friday, April 23rd – Sunday, April 25
Location: Online/Zoom
Event Registration
Alongside a keynote address from Professor Bonnie Honig of Brown University, the conference will feature a number of panels on feminist politics, indigenous politics, postcolonial theory, as well as on the history of race and political thought. Nearly every panel will include a discussion of women and gender, which makes this conference a fruitful site not only for intersectional work (on gender/race/class) but also for thinking of these questions in comparative and international systemic contexts.

The Films of Sarah Maldoror
2021-04-22 16:00 - 19:30 | Online/Zoom
Organized by UCLA Film & Television Archive
Free Registration (RSVP to receive Zoom link)
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is partnering with CSW and the Black Feminism Initiative to present two of Sarah Maldoror’s markedly distinct works: her first short, Monangambé (1969), and her satiric, delightful French television film, Dessert for Constance (1981). Presented in dialogue with each other, the two works construct a nuanced portrait of Maldoror’s unique formal, social and political concerns.
Featuring a post-screening conversation with Maldoror’s daughter, producer and distributor Annouchka de Andrade, UCLA Cinema & Media Studies PhD candidate Zama Dube, and UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Associate Professor Ellen C. Scott.

Paging through Photos and Songs: Hayganush Mark and Koharig Ghazarosian’s Friendship in Post-Genocide Istanbul
2021-04-20 12:00 - 13:30
Organized by the Promise Institute for Human Rights, UCLA School of Law
Date: April 20, 2021
Time: 12:00 PM
Location: Zoom Webinar (Register for link)
In this event, Dr. Lerna Ekmekcioglu (MIT) and Dr. Melissa Bilal (UCLA) will follow the story of a friendship between two Armenian women in Istanbul that endured the hardships of WWI, the Armenian Genocide, and early republican Turkey’s repressive minority politics. Hayganush Mark was the leading Armenian feminist writer of her time and Koharig Ghazarosian was a prominent composer, concert pianist, and piano teacher active in Paris and Istanbul. Their intertwined lives can be traced in photographs, letters, and pages of sheet music. Internationally acclaimed actress, filmmaker, and writer Nora Armani, mezzo-soprano Danielle Segen of the Vem Ensemble, and internationally renowned pianist Steven Vanhauwaert performed and recorded Ghazarosian’s song settings of Mark’s poetry to be premiered at this event. Through this repertoire which was brought back to life as a part of their ongoing project Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology and Digital Archive, Bilal and Ekmekcioglu will discuss the ruptures and continuities in Armenian community life in Turkey. This event is organized by the Promise Institute for Human Rights and Promise Armenian Institute in partnership with UCLA Armenian Music Program under the direction of Movses Pogossian.

Africa's Readiness for Climate Change (ARCC) Forum
2021-04-19 09:00 - 2021-04-23 09:00
Organized by the UCLA African Studies Center
Registration to attend ARCC is now open: RSVP here
Date: April 19-23, 2021
Time: 9:00 AM
Location: Zoom (RSVP for link)
The UCLA African Studies Center and the Earth Rights Institute invite you to engage with us in the 2021 virtual ARCC Forum. The inaugural forum will expand an integrated vision of “Green Development” in Africa that is both ecologically and economically sustainable, emphasizing local solutions to climate change developed by African stakeholders in urban and rural communities. ARCC 2021 will assemble interdisciplinary panels of scholars, scientists, industry leaders, climate change innovators, youth activists, and policy-makers to discuss cutting-edge research and the most successful sustainable development projects unfolding on the ground. Participants will identify priorities for research and implementation and collaboratively develop a five-year action plan.

Connecting Art & Law for Liberation
2021-04-16 16:00 - 2021-04-17 13:00 | Online
Organized by Criminal Justice Program, School of Law
Join visionary artists, activists, attorneys, advocates, legal scholars, and community members at UCLA to share innovative, cutting-edge collaborations at the intersection of ART and LAW – aimed at developing and disseminating new strategies to end mass incarceration.
FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

CSW Research Affiliates Brown Bag, "Resist, Reframe, Insist: Alice Notley’s Poetics of Inclusion" by Elline Lipkin
2021-04-16 12:00 - 13:00
A Talk by Elline Lipkin, PhD
Register Online
This talk considers the experimental poetics of contemporary American poet Alice Notley, one of the few women considered part of the New York school. Notley’s use of an “expanded ‘I’” within her work admits other voices into her poems, rather than just a singular speaker, particularly within her contemporary epic “The Descent of Alette.” Notley’s writing about motherhood and multivocality reflects her commitment to explore boundaries on the page and is a hallmark of her poetic vision.
DATE: Friday, April 16, 2021
TIME: 12:00 PM-1:00 PM
LOCATION: Zoom (RSVP to receive link)
Elline Lipkin is a poet, academic, and nonfiction writer. Her first book, The Errant Thread, was chosen by Eavan Boland for the Kore Press First Book Award. Her second book, Girls’ Studies, was published by Seal Press and explores contemporary girlhood in America. She is currently a Research Scholar with UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women and also teaches poetry for Los Angeles Writing Classes. From 2016-2018, she served as Poet Laureate of Altadena and co-edited the Altadena Poetry Review.

International human rights law and domestic violence: progress or retreat?
2021-03-05 09:00 - 10:15 | Online/Zoom
Organized by the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law
A Talk by Dr. Dubravka Šimonović
Date: Friday, March 5
Time: 9:00 – 10:15 AM
Location: Online/Zoom (RSVP for Zoom link)
Event Details
Dr. Dubravka Šimonović was appointed as United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences in June 2015 by the UN Human Rights Council for a six years’ tenure. Dr. Šimonović was a member of the UN CEDAW Committee between 2003 and 2014, and served as its Chairperson in 2007 and 2008. At the regional level she was the Chair of the Council of Europe’s Task Force to combat violence against women (2006-2007) that in its Final report proposed adoption of the CoE Convention on violence against women. Between 2008 and 2010, she co-chaired the Council of Europe’s intergovernmental Committee that drafted the Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence – The Istanbul Convention.
For a number of years she was in diplomacy in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Croatia – as a diplomat she attended the Fourth World Women’s conference in Beijing (1995) and served as the Chairperson of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (2000/2001). She finished her diplomatic carrier as the Ambassador of Croatia to the OSCE and United Nations in Vienna, Austria (2013-2015).
Dr. Šimonović holds a PhD in family law from the University of Zagreb. She is the author of several books and articles on women’s rights and violence against women. She also lectured at different universities and was a Visiting Professor in Practice in the Centre for Women, Peace and Security at LSE for 2016-2018.

Imagining the Political: Vernacular Idioms of Sexuality in India
2021-03-02 18:00 - 19:30
Organized by the Department of Asian American Studies and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center
Date: Tuesday, March 2, 2021
Time: 6:00 – 7:15 PM
Location: Online/Zoom (RSVP)
Professor Navaneetha Mokkil will discuss her new book, Unruly Figures, which navigates the pulsating links between subjectivity, political activism and the world-making capacity of cultural practices in a non-metropolitan region in India. It focuses on the non-linear figurations of the sex worker and the lesbian in Kerala, a state in Southern India, and the fractured processes of staging the politics of sexuality. The book moves back and forth from the post-1990s to the pre-1990s interlinking different forms, texts, genres and events in order to show how sexual subjects are not finished portraits, nor silenced bodies eager to claim visibility and recognition. Rather, the transactions between the subject and the figure point to the breaks in the conception of a cohesive, visible and agential political actor.
Navaneetha Mokkil teaches at the Center for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She is currently Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.

The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration
2021-03-02 12:15 - 13:30
Organized by Critical Race Studies at UCLA School of Law
DATE: Tuesday, March 2, 2021
TIME: 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM
LOCATION: Online/Zoom
Event Details | RSVP for Zoom link
Aya Gruber, author and Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, and Jennifer M. Chacón, Professor of Law and CRS core faculty member at UCLA Law School, will be discussing Gruber’s new book, The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration.
About the book: Many feminists grapple with the problem of hyper-incarceration in the United States, yet commentators on gender crime continue to assert that criminal law is not tough enough. This punitive impulse, prominent legal scholar Aya Gruber argues, is dangerous and counterproductive. In their quest to secure women’s protection from domestic violence and rape, American feminists have become soldiers in the war on crime by emphasizing white female victimhood, expanding the power of police and prosecutors, touting the problem-solving power of incarceration, and diverting resources toward law enforcement and away from marginalized communities. Deploying vivid cases and unflinching analysis, Gruber documents the failure of the state to combat sexual and domestic violence through law and punishment. Zero-tolerance anti-violence law and policy tend to make women less safe and more fragile. Mandatory arrests, no-drop prosecutions, forced separation, and incarceration embroil poor women of color in a criminal justice system that is historically hostile to them. This carceral approach exacerbates social inequalities by diverting more power and resources toward a fundamentally flawed criminal justice system, further harming victims, perpetrators, and communities alike. In order to reverse this troubling course, Gruber contends that we must abandon the conventional feminist wisdom, fight violence against women without reinforcing the American prison state, and use criminalization as a technique of last—not first—resort.

Visions of Fire: LGBTQ+ Voices (Weekend 2 of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center Film Festival 2021)
2021-02-27 15:00 - 18:00
Organized by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and the UCLA Film & Television Archive
Date: Saturday, February 27
Time: 3:00 PM
Location: Online/Zoom
FREE EVENT WITH RSVP
Event Details | RSVP
The Visions of Fire: LGBTQ+ Voices program will feature:
FRUIT FLY (2009)
10TH ANNIVERSARY SING-ALONG EDITION!

Fabulous. Fantastic. Fierce. Clear your living room, so you can sing and dance along in our celebration of this musical extravaganza’s 10th anniversary! Learn a few new moves and a whole lot of tunes as you follow our protagonist, a Filipina American performance artist, making a home for herself in her world and ours. Fruit Fly celebrates those who might feel marginal but are indispensable to community formation. This romp through San Francisco is brought to you by the team behind the indie hit Colma: The Musical. This screening will be an unforgettable party with queer Asian Americans and those who love them. You don’t want to miss it!
Color, 94 min. Directors: H.P. Mendoza.

Shu Mai Online (2020)

What’s a drag queen to do in the middle of a pandemic? Enter Jeffrey Liang, aka Miss Shu Mai, who teaches others to display the butt butt. This is UCLA EthnoCommunications alum and current UCLA Theater, Film and Television graduate student, Emory Chao Johnson’s contribution to Asian American Documentary Network’s #AsianAmCovidStories micro doc series.
Color, 2 min. Director: Emory Chao Johnson.

Razor Tongue, Episode 1 (2019)

If you don’t have the privilege of having a transgender Guamanian in your life, get ready! Rain Valdez will provide you with an education through this collaboratively created web series.
Color, 5 min. Director: Natalie Heltzel. Screenwriter: Rain Valdez. Cast: Rain Valdez, Shaan Dasani, Sarah Parlow.

Unspoken (2019)

This poignant short explores coming out to immigrant parents through what might be described as an epistolary genre. The audience bears witness to recitations from a group of diverse Asian Americans that might forever alter family dynamics.
Color, 18 min. Director: Patrick G. Lee.

Program will be introduced by UCLA Film & Television Archive Director May Hong HaDuong.
Conversation to follow with filmmaker H.P. Mendoza and actress, filmmaker, producer Rain Valdez.
Moderated by UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television associate dean and professor Sean Metzger.

"Since U Been Gone”: What Needs to Happen Post-Trump to Restore and Expand Reproductive Rights
2021-02-24 09:00 - 10:00
Organized by the UCLA Bixby Center on Population and Reproductive Health
Date: Wednesday, February 24, 2021
Time: 9:00 – 10:00 AM
Location: Online/Zoom (password: [REDACTED]
This is a Bixby lecture featuring Katherine Gillespie, Senior Federal Policy Counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, that focuses on restoring reproductive rights in a post-Trump era.

CSW Research Affiliates Brown Bag: Counternarratives and “Copy Cats”: Alma Whitaker
2021-02-11 12:00 - 13:00
Counternarratives and “Copy Cats”: Alma Whitaker, Newspaper Women and Place Making in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles
A Talk by Julie Cohen, PhD
Date: Thursday, February 11, 2021
Time: 12-1 pm
Location: Zoom
RSVP Online
As part of a larger project on women journalists in US Western cities in the early twentieth century, Julie Cohen will discuss writer Alma Whitaker—feminist, reporter, and columnist for the Los Angeles Times from 1910 to 1944. Widely known in her time but almost totally forgotten today, Whitaker employed wit, satire, and sarcasm to advance a strong feminist perspective with an emphasis on economic independence for women. Like so many “copy cats” in the region, her message both bolstered the white settler campaign to create Los Angeles as a “white spot” and challenged patriarchal norms. Situating Whitaker within the emergence of the mass-circulating urban newspaper industry, Cohen will analyze Whitaker’s prolific writings and the way in which they promoted and re-defined notions of women’s selfhood in the “frontier” space of Los Angeles.
Julie Cohen is a Research Affiliate at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and a lecturer in the Department of History at Cal State Los Angeles.

Gender, Race, and Age Behind Bars: Impacts of Long-term Sentencing
2021-02-03 12:15 - 13:30 | Virtual
This event has passed. Watch the discussion on CSW’s YouTube channel!

The parole suitability rate for the elderly incarcerated is 10 percent BELOW the average suitability rate, even though research indicates seniors are the safest population to release.
— Jane Dorotik
Co-hosted by the Criminal Justice Program at the UCLA School of Law and the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office
DATE: Wednesday, February 3, 2021
TIME: 12:15 PM-1:30 PM
LOCATION: Zoom Webinar (View Livestream)
View event flyer.
Join us for a rare opportunity to hear from two formerly-incarcerated women activists on the compounded adverse impacts of long-term sentencing on the elderly incarcerated, women and transgender people, and people of color in prison and beyond. Jane Dorotik was incarcerated for almost 20 years on a wrongful conviction. She was released in April 2020 due to COVID-19 concerns, and her conviction was reversed in July 2020. Romarilyn Ralston was incarcerated for 23 years, and is now the Program Director of Project Rebound at the California State University-Fullerton. Both are organizers with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP). Dorotik and Ralston will be in dialogue with LA County Public Defender, Ricardo Garcia, and moderator Alicia Virani, Gilbert Foundation Director of the Criminal Justice Program at the UCLA School of Law.
This event is free and open to the public with registration.
This activity is approved for 1 hour of general MCLE credit. UCLA School of Law is a State Bar of California approved MCLE provider.
Co-Sponsored by

The Promise Institute for Human Rights at the UCLA School of Law

Required readings for MCLE credit:
All Zoom registrants will be contacted after the event with instructions for how to receive MCLE credit.

CSW Policy Brief 2020, “Confronting the Carceral State: Reimagining Justice” (please note: this links to all 2020 Policy Briefs, but only the briefs listed below are required reading):

“Release Elderly Lifers to Reduce Mass Incarceration” by Jane Dorotik
“Long-Term Incarcerated People Need Retirement Benefits” by Romarilyn Ralston with Ginny Oshiro and Fidelia Santos-Aminy

Legislation on elderly parole: Assembly Bill No. 1448
What Prisoners Need to Know by the Social Security Administration

PANELISTS

Jane Dorotik is a Registered Nurse and healthcare professional who worked in community mental health administration for many years. She had been incarcerated for almost 20 years on a wrongful conviction that she relentlessly works to overturn. She was released in April 2020 due to COVID-19 concerns, and her conviction was reversed in July 2020. She is a member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), a current member of the Board of Directors of Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), and a former board member of Justice Now. She also founded Compassionate Companions, an organization within the California Institution for Women (CIW) that provides care and companionship for terminally ill incarcerated people, and founded and published the CIW newsletter Strive High for eight years. She advocates for prison abolition as well as dignity and compassion for her fellow prisoners, especially those who are terminally ill.
Romarilyn Ralston is the Program Director of Project Rebound at the California State University-Fullerton (CSUF), which provides formerly incarcerated students with tools and opportunities to help them thrive as scholars. She is also an organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), and an alumna of California’s Women’s Policy Institute. Ralston holds a BA with honors in Gender and Feminist Studies from Pitzer College and an MA in Liberal Arts from Washington University.

Ricardo D. García currently serves as Los Angeles County’s Public Defender, the oldest and largest public defender agency in the United States. Born in Los Angeles to immigrant parents from Mexico, Mr. García is a first-generation college graduate. He received his Juris Doctorate in 1995 from the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, and his Bachelor of Art in Politics in 1991 at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He began his legal career in 1995 with the San Diego Public Defender’s Office. Mr. Garcia is known as a noteworthy leader in the field of criminal defense. He has handled several high-profile cases in the San Diego County Public Defender’s Office, including the longest and most complicated death penalty trial in state history, and was awarded Trial Lawyer of the Year by the Criminal Defense Association of San Diego.
Alicia Virani (Moderator) is the Gilbert Foundation Associate Director of the Criminal Justice Program at UCLA School of Law. She was previously a Deputy Public Defender in the Orange County Public Defender’s Office where she represented indigent clients in criminal matters and parents navigating the dependency system. She currently teaches a clinical course where students represent clients in felony bail hearings as well as a course on trauma informed lawyering and restorative justice. Her work and expertise is in developing alternatives to the criminal legal system.

Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl
2020-11-13 09:00 - 10:00
Organized by the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law
Date: Friday, November 13
Time: 9:00 – 10:00 AM
Location: Online/Zoom
Event Details | RSVP for Zoom link
Ratna Kapur, a Professor of International Law at Queen Mary University of London, will be discussing her book “Gender, Alterity, and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl.” The book is about the possibility of freedom in the aftermath of the critique of human rights. Kapur interrogates human rights as a project of freedom through a critical evaluation and analysis of scholarship and advocacy on LGBT rights, campaigns against violence against women, and gender equality interventions in the context of the Islamic veil bans in Europe. Kapur illustrates how human rights emerge as a governance and regulatory endeavour in relation to gender and alterity, and how more rights for women, sexual and religious minorities have not necessarily produced more freedom for these constituencies. In response to what happens when the faith in human rights as a liberal freedom project is so substantively eroded, she provocatively argues in favor of exploring non-liberal approaches to freedom and the futurity of human rights within such a pursuit.

Planning for a Healthy Home, Body, and Baby
2020-11-10 15:00 - 2020-11-17 16:30
Organized by the Iris Cantor-UCLA Women’s Health Center
Register for this event to receive Zoom link
Session 1
Date: Tuesday, November 10, 2020
Time: 3:00 – 4:30 PM
Location: Online/Zoom
Topics:
“Planning for a Healthy Home, Body & Baby During COVID-19 and Beyond” presented by Luz Chacon, Salud y Algeria Wellness
“How to Make a Non-Toxic Cleaning Product (demonstration)” presented by Maria Bejarano, Esperanza Community Housing Corporation
“Lead Poisoning Prevention” presented by Ellie Tam, LA County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program
Session 2
Date: Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Time: 3:00 – 4:30 PM
Location: Online/Zoom
Topics:
“Toxic-Free Face Creams” presented by Faith Rader, CA Dept. of Public Health
“Making and Choosing Toxic-Free Cosmetics (demonstration)” presented by Ellen Branch, Black Women for Wellness
“Healthy Nail Salons” presented by Dung Nguyen – CA Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative

CSW Research Affiliate Brown Bag: Women in Postwar Franco-Japanese Films
2020-10-30 12:00 - 13:00
Women in Postwar Franco-Japanese Films
A Talk by Hannah Holtzman, PhD
Date: Friday, October 30thTime: 12-1 pm
Location: Online/Zoom
RSVP
As part of a larger project on Franco-Japanese exchange in cinema, Hannah Holtzman will discuss the roles of women in the first two Franco-Japanese cinematic co-productions, Typhoon over Nagasaki (1957) and Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Hiroshima mon amour, a collaboration by Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais, is perhaps best known for its formal innovation, but it also introduced a new configuration of gender roles, responding to both the fading tradition of Japonisme and the stereotypical race and gender roles in its immediate precursor Typhoon over Nagasaki. Typhoon over Nagasaki, a commercial if not critical success at its release, has been more or less forgotten by scholars today. This talk will compare gender in these films and analyze how both played a pivotal role in restarting Franco-Japanese cultural exchange in the postwar era.
Hannah Holtzman is a Research Affiliate at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of San Diego’s Humanities Center. Her
research in global film studies and the environmental humanities focuses on Franco-
Japanese cultural exchange and nuclear cinema. Her work has been published in French Studies and Contemporary French Civilization.

An Archival Cure: Remedy, Care, and Curation of HIV-Positive Artists’ Records with the Visual AIDS Archive Project
2020-10-29 15:00 - 17:00
Organized by the UCLA Department of Information Studies
Date: Thursday, October 29, 2020
Time: 3:00 PM
Location: Online/Zoom
Marika Cifor, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. She is a feminist scholar of archival studies and digital studies. Her research investigates how individuals and communities marginalized by gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and HIV-status are represented and how they document and represent themselves and their social movements in archives and digital cultures. This multidisciplinary scholarship uncovers how archives and digital technologies, data, and cultures are shaping identities, experiences, and social movements.
AIDS activists, advocacy organizations, physicians and medical researchers, and people living with HIV/AIDS have devoted vast energy and resources to finding a medical cure for HIV/AIDS. Now well into the fourth decade of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, a medical cure remains elusive. Drawing from her book-in-progress, Viral Cultures: Activist Archives at the End of AIDS, Marika Cifor examines activist archiving as cure. Since 1994, Visual AIDS a community-based arts organization has documented, collected, preserved, and made accessible the records of artists living with HIV and estates of artists who have perished, in order to preserve and honor their legacies, and to expose and redress AIDS’ injustices. The holistic cure Visual AIDS demands is requisite to responding in kind to an epidemic that is and always has been political and cultural as much as biomedical. In this talk, Cifor analyzes the Archive Project’s curative efforts and their implications in three parts. First, examining the archives as a remedy for one kind of death, that of artistic career. Second, she turns to AIDS archiving as communal acts of critical care. Finally, she examines the archives as curing, preserving digitally to ensure long-term animation. The Archive Project and the Artist+ Registry, its digital archives counterpart, highlight the material and conceptual affordances of archiving as anti-AIDS activism. Its records and their nimble activation hold imaginative capacities for challenging persistent gendered, racialized, and classed discrimination and stigmatization faced by those living with HIV/AIDS. The archives’ work also demonstrates the conjoined limitations of art and activist archiving in meeting urgent needs and redressing harm. Despite such constraints, activist archiving can vitally engender survival.

Indigenous Insights about Policing
2020-10-27 16:00 - 18:00
Organized by the UCLA American Indian Studies Center
The discussion is free and open to the public, but registration is still required.
Date: Tuesday, October 27, 2020
Time: 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
Location: Virtual Event
Event Details
This virtual panel discussion features Sarah Deer (Muscogee (Creek) Nation), Dian Million (Tanana Athabascan), Stephanie Lumsden (Hupa), and Sandi Pierce (Seneca) speaking on the subject of policing in the United States. The session will be moderated by Christine Stark (Anishinaabe & Cherokee).
The event is co-sponsored by the UCLA American Indian Studies Center, Repair, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, and Innovations Human Trafficking Collaborative
This event is open to the public. Free tickets are available on demand. Optional sliding-scale donations are also welcome and help offset event costs.

Planning for a Feminist Future: Building back differently
2020-10-26 09:00 - 10:30
Organized by the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law
Date: Monday, October 26, 2020
Time: 9:00 AM
Location: Online/Zoom
Event Details
Promise Institute for Human Rights High-Level Speaker Series on Human Rights Around the World
Leymah Gbowee, 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, is a peace activist, trained social worker, and women’s rights advocate. She currently serves as Executive Director of the Women, Peace, and Security Program at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. She is the founder and current President of the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, the founding head of the Liberia Reconciliation Initiative, and the co-founder and former Executive Director of Women Peace and Security Network Africa (WIPSEN-A).

(still) Missing in Action: The International Crime of the Slave Trade
2020-10-23 09:00 - 10:00
Organized by the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law
Date: Friday, October 23, 2020
Time: 9:00 AM
Location: Online/Zoom
Event Details
Please join us for the next talk in the Promise Institute for Human Rights’ High-Level Speaker Series on Women, Gender and the Law. Patricia Viseur Sellers will speak on the missing international crime of the slave trade, incorporating jurisprudence from the Yugoslavia tribunal and International Criminal Court as well as evidence of the Yazidi and the Libyan situation of Slave Markets. With a particular focus on gender, she will examine how this trajectory ties into current issues of reparations for slavery and colonialism.

Whose Streets? Building Safe Communities for All
2020-10-19 12:15 - 2020-11-02 13:30
Organized by the UCLA Law Criminal Justice Law Review
Date: Monday, October 19, 2020
Time: 12:15 – 1:30 PM
Location: Online/Zoom, occurring every Monday for 3 weeks (Oct. 19, Oct. 26, and Nov. 2)
Event Details: Session 1 | Session 2 | Session 3
Free and open to the public, this symposium will invite scholars, policymakers, and activists together to discuss community-centered alternatives to traditional policing. A major focus of the symposium is to elevate new modes of public safety that better protect vulnerable populations, including women, and especially women of color. While this theme will run throughout, we are focusing a day (10/26) on policing inside the home, with a special emphasis on discussing interventions for domestic abuse that do not result in greater danger to victims or systemic and unjustified separation of families.
Speakers include:
Ronda Goldfein, Safehouse
Mariah Monsanto, BYP100 (She Safe, We Safe campaign)
Assemblymember Sydney Kamlager-Dove, California State Assembly
Farhang Heydari, Policing Project at NYU Law

2020 Awards Celebration
2020-10-16 13:00 - 15:00 | Online
This event has passed. Watch Alicia Garza’s keynote address and Q&A on CSW’s YouTube channel!

CELEBRATE 35 YEARS OF THE UCLA CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WOMEN
Join the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW) for a special virtual event on Friday, October 16th to honor the Center’s accomplishments, student award recipients, and this year’s Distinguished Leader in Feminism Award honoree!
FEATURING THE KEYNOTE ADDRESS
The Purpose of Power: Building Movements in A Time of Pandemic
by
Alicia Garza

Co-Creator, #BlackLivesMatter
Co-Founder, Supermajority
Founder, Black Futures Lab
This year, CSW has selected Alicia Garza as the recipient of the Center for the Study of Women’s 2020 Distinguished Leader in Feminism Award. She is an innovator, strategist, and organizer, and the co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter and the Black Lives Matter Global Network, an international organizing project to end state violence and oppression against Black people.
Building on the insights in her soon-to-be-released book The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, Alicia Garza addresses some of the most pressing and important questions around movement building and brutal anti-Black state violence in a time of global pandemic. How do we build relations of care and solidarity amongst people and groups with different investments and interests? What lessons can we learn from decades of Black feminist theorizing and organizing around coalition? How do the specificities of today’s conditions, including the challenges of organizing remotely and the contemporary manifestation of state white supremacy, call for new strategies?
Event Flyer (PDF)
The keynote will be followed by a Q&A with Brittnee Meitzenheimer and Zama Dube of the Black Feminism Initiative.

EVENT DETAILS & REGISTRATION
Date: Friday, October 16th
Time: 1:00 – 3:00 PM (PST)
Location: Zoom Webinar
Registrants will receive a Zoom link a few days prior to the event. If the Zoom room is at capacity, attendees will be able to view the event on YouTube live stream.
This event has now passed. Please watch Alicia Garza’s keynote address, The Purpose of Power: Building Movements in a Time of Pandemic, followed by a Q&A with the Black Feminism Initiative at our YouTube channel.
For questions, please contact CSW at csw@csw.ucla.edu.

ABOUT THE KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Alicia Garza founded the Black Futures Lab to make Black communities powerful in politics. In 2018, the Black Futures Lab conducted the largest survey of Black communities in over 150 years.
Alicia believes that Black communities deserve what all communities deserve — to be powerful in every aspect of their lives. An innovator, strategist, organizer, and cheeseburger enthusiast, she is the co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter and the Black Lives Matter Global Network, an international organizing project to end state violence and oppression against Black people. The Black Lives Matter Global Network now has 40 chapters in 4 countries.
Alicia serves as the Strategy & Partnerships Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the nation’s premier voice for millions of domestic workers in the United States. She is also the co-founder of Supermajority, a new home for women’s activism. She shares her thoughts on the women transforming power in Marie Claire magazine every month.
Her forthcoming book, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, will be released on October 20, 2020, and she warns you — hashtags don’t start movements. People do.

Co-sponsored by:

UCLA International Institute

Beyond Innocence
2020-10-08 12:15 - 13:45
Talk by Professor Miriam Ticktin, the New School for Social Research
Date: Thursday, October 8, 2020
Time: 12:15 PM – 1:45 PM
Location: Zoom
Professor Ticktin’s talk on Racial Innocence will launch our year-long speakers’ series on Structural Violence. Culture, Power, and Social Change is a colloquium series in the Department of Anthropology that is aimed at an interdisciplinary audience of graduate students from a range of departments including anthropology, gender studies, sociology, ethnic studies departments, world arts and cultures/dance, ethnomusicology, urban planning and public policy, and the School of Medicine.
This talk addresses the relationship between innocence and politics; even as innocence is defined against politics, as freedom from the worldly and unworldly – my argument is that innocence is deployed in politically potent ways . Indeed, I suggest it has moved to the center of political life today. The larger book of which this is a part investigates how discourses and images of innocence get assembled and weaponized across the fields of immigration, gender politics, racial politics and environmentalism. It is a flexible concept that intimately shapes why and how we should care, for whom, and whose lives matter. I will focus on innocence as a racialized tool that is central to border regimes—I will discuss both European and American borders — producing the difference between deserving and undeserving, refugee and economic migrant, and ultimately functioning to redraw understandings of “humanity” and its constituent outsides.
Professor Miriam Ticktin has served as Director of Gender Studies, Chair of Anthropology, and Co-Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School. Her work sits at the intersection of the race and immigration studies, anthropology of medicine, and transnational and postcolonial feminist theory.
Co-Sponsored by

Center for the Study of Women
Center for European and Russian Studies

Once More, With Feeling... (New Wight Biennial 2020)
2020-10-01 09:00 - 2020-10-31 23:30 | Online
Organized by the UCLA Department of Art
Date: Tuesday, October 1, 2020
Time: 9:00 AM
Location: Online Exhibition, on display Oct 1.-Oct. 31
Gallery Website
The exhibition focuses on the contemporary resonances of the Non-Aligned Movement. We were interested in asking how Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Empire throughout the third world impact contemporary art globally by engaging with how the political project of Non-Alignment finds itself articulated in the aesthetic, formal, social, economic, and political articulations of contemporary art today. The question that arises is, why deal with this movement today, or better, why have the ideas and concepts of this movement seen such a resurgence, and with such prominence in art in the past few years?
The exhibition will “open” (the website will become live & accessible) on October 1st. The website will display the work (sculpture, video, performance, painting) of the 24 participating artists and will be complemented by programming. There will be 4 different panel discussions each centered around a different theme related to Non-Alignment. There will also be a feminist manifesto writing workshop that will meet 3 times throughout October in order to bring together a manifesto for the exhibition.

CSW Information Session for Graduate Students
2020-09-30 14:00 - 14:30
This 30-minute session will offer an overview of the Center for the Study of Women with a short video and a Q&A on the center’s funding and job opportunities for UCLA Graduate students.

CSW Open House 2020
2020-09-30 12:00 - 14:00 | Online/Zoom
Come learn about the UCLA Center for the Study of Women! Stop by our open Zoom room between 12 and 2pm to find out about our research streams, upcoming events (Alicia Garza on 10/16!), funding opportunities (for both grad students and undergrads), and job opportunities. When you visit, sign up for our mailing list to automatically enter our raffle. Winners will receive CSW swag!

Explore "The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization" and talk with author Sean Metzger
2020-05-28 12:00 - 13:00
Organized by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center
Zoom talk with author Sean Metzger and CSW Director Rachel Lee
In The Chinese Atlantic, Sean Metzger charts processes of global circulation across and beyond the Atlantic, exploring how seascapes generate new understandings of Chinese migration, financial networks and artistic production. Moving across film, painting, performance, and installation art, Metzger traces flows of money, culture, and aesthetics to reveal the ways in which routes of commerce stretching back to the Dutch Golden Age have molded and continue to influence the social reproduction of Chineseness. With a particular focus on the Caribbean, Metzger investigates the expressive culture of Chinese migrants and the communities that received these waves of people. He interrogates central issues in the study of similar case studies from South Africa and England to demonstrate how Chinese Atlantic seascapes frame globalization as we experience it today. Frequently focusing on art that interacts directly with the sites in which it is located, Metzger explores how Chinese migrant laborers and entrepreneurs did the same to shape— both physically and culturally—the new spaces in which they found themselves. In this manner, Metzger encourages us to see how artistic imagination and practice interact with migration to produce a new way of framing the global.
DATE: Thursday, May 28, 2020
TIME: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
LOCATION: Webinar (RSVP through EventBrite for webinar link)
Sean Metzger is the Vice Chair, Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Theater. He is a scholar who works at the intersections of several fields: visual culture (art, fashion, film, theater) as well as Asian American, Caribbean, Chinese, film, performance and sexuality studies. His new book is titled: The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2020) the text complicates discourses of globalization and reimagines geographies through an examination of aesthetic objects and practices situated in cities from Shanghai to Cape Town.
Rachel Lee is Director of the Center for the Study of Women and Professor of Gender Studies, English, and the Institute of Society and Genetics at UCLA. She is the author of The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies (NYU, 2014) and editor of a newly published special issue of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience (May 2020) on Chemical Entanglements: Gender and Exposure, the introduction of which highlights the work of Hong Kong and Brooklyn-based glassmaker and artist, Jes Fan.
Co-sponsored by:

Department of Theater
Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media
Asia Pacific Center
Asian American Studies Department

Digital Dance Criticism: Screens as Choreographic Apparatus
2020-04-14 18:30 - 20:00
Organized by the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance
An online lecture by Kate Mattingly, University of Utah
Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2020
Time: 6:30pm-7:50pm
Location: Zoom
Prior to the introduction of websites and social media, professional dance criticism circulated through print publications: newspapers, magazines, and journals. This presentation examines the current proliferation of screens as platforms for criticism and how they-mobile devices, laptops, televisions, and computers-shift the frameworks that writers and readerships use to engage with dance. I use the concept of a choreographic apparatus to show how digital technologies generate symbiotic relationships between online contexts and contemporary performance. By focusing on three sites-thlNKingDANCE, On the Boards TV, and Amara Tabor-Smith’s House/Full of Black Women-I analyze how these platforms challenge widespread assumptions about the disappearance of dance critics.
Kate Mattingly is an Assistant Professor in the School of Dance at the University of Utah. She received her doctoral degree in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in New Media from the University of California, Berkeley. She currently teaches courses in dance histories, theory, and criticism.
